Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday June 19, 2013 @11:00AM
from the oracle-still-evil dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As reported earlier on Slashdot it appeared the license covering the MySQL man pages was changed from the GPL to something less good. However, as speculated, this appears to be a bug."
The build system was grabbing the wrong files, oops. The fix should be coming shortly: "Once the fixes have been made to the build system, we will rebuild the latest 5.1, 5.5, 5.6 releases plus the latest 5.7 milestone and make those available publicly asap."

Duh? You know, maybe the MariaDB people should actually investigate things before making massive conclusion jumps? Sowing FUD against Oracle and MySQL for their benefit seems to be more important than getting the truth.

So they just HAPPENED to accidentally include a new license? eh, sounds fishy. Oracle screws up everything they touch. I was at Sun Microsystems for some ZFS training shortly after the Oracle buyout... the look of defeat these guys had...

Duh? You know, maybe the MariaDB people should actually investigate things before making massive conclusion jumps?

Let's give oracle the benefit of the doubt: even if this was inserted by the NSA, MariaDB gave the proper response. If a car manufacturer accidentally released a car with a warranty that required people use fuel brand $X, people should rightly make hay about it.

No everyone should stop new development against MySQL or MariaDB (which will eventually sell us out, just like they did in the past), and start using a better- truly FOS solution: Postgres, you'll be glad you did.

That's true of all bugs, in the abstract. If a tree falls in a forest, and all that. This seems like a legitimate answer -- remember that they maintain a separate repository for their commercial offering [mysql.com]. It's entirely possible someone fat-fingered during compilation.

Ah, to paraphrase, "there is a principle which is a bar against all knowledge and will never fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- and that is contempt prior to investigation." You can't simply say "because this person/group/organization has done so many evil things in the past, this has to be as well." You start engaging in that kind of thinking regularly and before you know it you'll be a talk show host or running for political office.

Ah, to paraphrase, "there is a principle which is a bar against all knowledge and will never fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- and that is contempt prior to investigation." You can't simply say "because this person/group/organization has done so many evil things in the past, this has to be as well." You start engaging in that kind of thinking regularly and before you know it you'll be a talk show host or running for political office.

Hey now, let's not say such hurtful things!

I do have a probably chalking this whole thing up to a minor slip up - there was a licence there to read, which was purposefully changed as opposed to a lack of licence so some boilerplate was placed in there.

Ah, to paraphrase, "there is a principle which is a bar against all knowledge and will never fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- and that is contempt prior to investigation." You can't simply say "because this person/group/organization has done so many evil things in the past, this has to be as well

No, you can't. On the other hand, if you don't say "because this p/g/o has done so many evil things in the past, this probably is as well" then you're a fool at best, likely an idiot, and possibly insane.

The expression is actually "that which can be adequately explained by stupidly." There are many evils that could only be explained by once-in-a-million-years stupidity, which probably wouldn't be an adequate explanation.

If they maintain a separate repository for their commercial offering, then how did the commercial files get into the code base? It hardly seems like something that would happen accidentally. I don't claim it's impossible, but it seems very darned unlikely and far too "coincidental". Like, "lightning struck my homework" kind of coincidental.

It's a little disingenuous to say that. Everybody writes bugs. I consider myself to be an expert coder, I've been doing it for well over 20 years with hundreds of successful projects. I've lead some of the best teams. And yet, no matter what, *everything* has bugs. Some big, some small. Granted, Oracle is rather slow in fixing general bugs. But I've found that with support, if you have a show-stopper bug in your database, they will write a hot-fix for you. I still don't like Larry Ellison though.

I know Oracle is a supposed to be super evil lawyer driven blah blah blah... but just so we get the story straight, Monty sells MySql to Sun, Oracle buys Sun, Monty wants MySql back as MariaDb. At this point, Monty and the MySql community have cried wolf one to many fucking times. I really just don't care anymore.

Actually, Monty sold MySQL to Sun, then after the terms of his agreement were met, he forked an open source project and we now have MariaDB. All legal and moral and above board. Lots of us are grateful as well, due to the improvements that MariaDB is bringing over MySQL.

That people were entertaining notions otherwise was asinine, regardless of it involving Oracle. This might have actually been something to worry about if the documents weren't already dual licensed. This sort of mistake has been made time and time again, and will continue to be made time and time again.